Operation Incoherence

Despite a lifetime of experience calculated to encourage cynicism about politicians,
I hoped for a few moments that President Barack Obama, an obviously intelligent
man who had spent time as a law professor – an occupation widely reputed to
be consonant with a facility for logic – despite his lack
of experience in foreign affairs, might have come up with a logical strategy
for Afghanistan. But it appears that the instincts of the politician took over,
and instead he came up with a
muddled approach more calculated to
appease divergent constituencies [.pdf] within the executive branch than
to deal with the problems, real and imagined, that face the United States in
Afghanistan.

He does have the politician’s capacity for papering over bad policies with
comforting words. Thus President Obama told congressional leaders on Thursday
that "The era of the blank check is over" in Afghanistan. But the
plan he laid
out Friday looks very much like a blank check for an increased military
and civilian presence in Afghanistan that is unlikely to succeed or end any
time soon.

This ostensible plan, which is supposed to have been the result of a "bottom-up"
reassessment of the situation
and goals in that country, looks more like the typical plan assembled by a
committee composed of people with differing interests and no coherent
guiding vision.

Bring in 17,000 more military people? Already underway. Send in another 4,000
military people to train the Afghan army and police, which we have supposedly
been doing for almost seven years? Check. Send in hundreds, maybe thousands
more civilian workers to – well it’s a little vague, but roads and electricity
seem to be on the agenda. Redouble
diplomatic efforts? That too. Make it a regional conflict that includes
Pakistan – as well as Iran, India, China, and various ‘Stans? Of course.

Fred Kaplan, the military analyst
at Slate.com, sees the plan as an attempt to meld two probably incompatible
approaches – counterterrorism and
counterinsurgency. A counterterrorist approach, if I understand his description
accurately, involves a fairly aggressive attempt to seek and destroy terrorist
bands so that their capacity for creating disruption is neutralized.

A counterinsurgency
approach, on the other hand, is a longer-term
strategy calculated to make ordinary people in a contested territory safer
and therefore less likely to support insurgents. Thus there’s an emphasis on
building roads, electricity production, and the like, as well as buttressing
the capacity
to govern while keeping the local population secure from attacks. This
is a more time-consuming approach,
likely to take perhaps 10 years in a country like Afghanistan, which has never
had – and may not want – a central government with much real authority beyond
the capital of Kabul.

Of course President Obama is better at phrasing objectives so that they sound
fairly realistic than former President Bush ever was, and he’s therefore
more capable of getting journalists and other
observers to buy in. And he knows the usefulness of talking about "benchmarks."
So, as the Financial
Times put it, the "president’s strategy is expected to shift the
focus of operations in Afghanistan to ensuring that al-Qaeda cannot attack
the U.S., which represents a ratcheting down of the ambitious goals of George
W. Bush, the former president, who pledged to instill democracy in Afghanistan."

The purported narrowing of the mission,
however, is belied by a broadening of the U.S. resources – more civilians than
President Bush ever contemplated and a 60 percent increase in the $2 billion
a month Afghan operations now cost, projected for at least the next five years
– being committed by the Obama administration.

If the goal were really to ensure that Afghanistan is not
a base for international operations by al-Qaeda, it would be possible to
declare "mission accomplished" and end U.S. and NATO military operations
now. The evidence is that
al-Qaeda is confined to Pakistani
territory. The Taliban, while it showed itself to be tyrannical and obnoxious
when it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, is not believed to have international
ambitions. So the core U.S. interest in Afghanistan could be satisfied by informing
whatever government emerges there that any emergence of al-Qaeda bases will
be met by swift and devastating action to destroy them.

Given all that, a more
measured approach, involving improved intelligence capabilities and occasional
special forces actions, is more likely to be effective than ramped-up overt
military activity. If the
calculations of some independent
observers are correct, this should suffice to keep al-Qaeda contained and
incapable of launching significant attacks against the West. One wonders whether
statements from various official and semi-official spokespersons to the effect
that al-Qaeda has beefed up its capacity reflect reliable intelligence or are
yet another example of interpreting the intelligence to support a preordained
policy.

Since almost everyone with whom I have spoken says that U.S. intelligence
about what al-Qaeda is really up to in the tribal areas is slim to nonexistent,
it’s difficult not to suspect the latter.

Perhaps most significant, President Obama’s ostensible plan seems to make
no operational distinction
between the Taliban
and al-Qaeda. Yet the evidence is that the Taliban is essentially a movement
indigenous to Afghanistan, which, as Robert Kaplan explained in his invaluable
book, Soldiers
of God, because of Afghanistan’s long-term relative isolation from
the rest of the world, practices a different brand of Islam from many other
countries, one largely concerned with personal faith and behavior than with
some larger goal of reestablishing an international caliphate. It is
unlikely to disappear from the Afghan landscape. Al-Qaeda, in contrast,
has an internationalist approach and, our experience sadly shows, is oriented
toward attacking perceived centers of infidelity like the United States and
to some extent Western Europe.

As we learned in the late 1990s, the Taliban,
if it ever comes back to power in Afghanistan,
would be likely to oppress women and engage in numerous practices that would
offend the sensibilities and sense of justice of Westerners. But it would be
unlikely to want to export its brand of Islam or directly support terrorist
activities overseas. It might just be possible to come to an arrangement with
a Taliban regime not to harbor more internationally oriented groups like al-Qaeda
or its imitators. At least that would be worth a try. Such an arrangement would
free up resources to work against al-Qaeda.

That would have been a fresh approach that recognized the closest thing to
a legitimate interest the United States has in what occurs along the mostly
artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead of coming up with
a fresh approach, President Obama is doubling
down on the Bush approach. It doesn’t
seem likely to work on its
own terms, but it will keep U.S. forces and resources tied down in a desultory
conflict that is most unlikely to yield anything resembling victory.